The Sapphire Express (22 page)

“I apologize, ma’am,” I said as respectfully as I could. “I am truly sorry to bother you this at this late hour, but this is a sort of an emergency situation. I am leaving town tomorrow, and I need to give you this bag before I go. It is full of money, more than one hundred thousand dollars. It’s a donation from a very wealthy man who doesn’t need it anymore because he had a date with death tonight. Please, take it,” I said and offered the bag to the sleepy woman.

She reached out her trembling arm hesitantly and said, “Sir, I don’t understand.”

“It is OK, ma’am. Please just take the bag upstairs and open it tomorrow. Then go to the bank and put all the money in the orphanage’s bank account, OK?”

“Um, is it real money?” she said and rubbed her eyes with her free hand.

“Yes, it is real money, ma’am, and nobody will ever take it away from you. It’s for the kids.”

“You mean for the angels?”

“Yes, the money is for the angels, ma’am.”

She looked straight into my eyes and gave me a warm smile. I smiled back, and she took my hand and held it gently for a moment. Her touch was soft and warm, like an angel’s touch. Then she let go and said, “You are an angel too—an angel who emerges only when the stars are out and the moon is at its brightest. I knew that you would come.”

“Good night, ma’am,” I said and started walking to the Econoline.

“Good night, sir. God bless your soul. I hope your troubles go away.”

“Thank you, ma’am. You are a true miracle. Your kind will save this world from itself.”

The tired woman smiled at me and disappeared into the sleeping orphanage.

After the first pit stop was successfully completed, I drove to Johnny D’s. I needed to say my last good-byes to the shitty bar and leave a little message to the gentleman criminals who owned it. They needed to understand that their mistake didn’t come cheap and accept that they should have never trusted that stupid Ramses who now lay dead in his dirty underwear, waiting patiently for the first starving raccoon to bite his ruddy nose off. They should have never sent those two bald idiots to kill me because they also now lay lifeless in the forbidden forest. I wished that I could have to put the gentleman criminals in my van, too, but it was, unfortunately, too late for that. The silver lining was, however, that the nuclear storm was going to take care of them for me and give the cruel Mr. Cancer a chance to eat their spleens and turn their eyes yellow.

I parked near the bar’s front door and noticed that the street was totally dead. Even the homeless man and his crippled cat had abandoned their favorite street corner and gone somewhere else to get some well-earned shut-eye. Everything was motionless, like in an old black-and-white photograph, and the crazies who had been partying at Johnny D’s had been kicked out already hours ago. The whole block was a graveyard of broken dreams and long lost love, but also an excellent venue for a little nightly extravaganza.

I jumped out of the Econoline and opened Johnny’s door quietly with the keys I had taken from Ramses. I walked into the dark bar and gazed around like a wolf in a fox’s lair. A neon Miller Lite sign was glowing on the wall invitingly, and it provided me with just enough light to find my way around the room without bumping into chairs and tables.

I stopped at the bathroom door and listened carefully for any human sounds and prepared to subdue cousin Sammy, or whatever the hell his real name was, in case he had decided to take a late-night piss before heading home. Luckily, the bathroom was empty, and I was relieved that I didn’t have to resort to violence. It was just too goddamn late for that crap.

I ventured into the bar’s private quarters and turned the lights on. I was already somewhat familiar with the space, since Ramses and I had dragged the slim man through the bar to the back door, but I had never been to the kitchen, and that was the place I was looking for. Fortunately, Ramses’s private world was small, and it didn’t take me long to find the swing doors that led to the land of Bratwurst and other mysterious culinary creations that the bar’s brave customers had devoured for years without asking any unnecessary questions about the ingredients or their sell-by date.

I pushed the doors open and stepped into the kitchen that was dirtier than Philip Ashton’s underwear. I glanced around the filthy galley and smiled a wicked smile when I saw a six-burner gas range waiting for a bratwurst, or a rattlesnake sausage, in one of the kitchen’s dark corners. I walked to the soulless warrior whose only job was to provide delicious meals for starving addicts and drunken fools—yours truly included—and ran my hand over the cold surface of the griddle. To my great surprise, the range was a well-maintained piece of machinery, and it seemed like Ramses, or maybe cousin Sammy, actually spent some time cleaning the damn thing after each long night in hell was over. I almost felt sorry for the poor bastard because it was going be baptized by fire.

I pulled the range out and detached the connector from the gas pipe and turned the greasy lever in a position that would allow a maximum amount of gas to flow out. When I did that, the pipe started hissing like an angry cobra, and I backed off, thinking how damn easy it was to destroy things. It seemed almost unfair that any idiot with a pair of malicious hands could wipe out years of hard work with the light of a match. I just didn’t understand why building something great was so hard and demanding, but destroying it was so goddamn effortless.

After the snake was out of its cage, I walked to the sink and washed my hands. Then I grabbed two canola oil spray cans, put them in the microwave, set the timer for twenty minutes, and pressed start. The spray can trick was entirely unnecessary, of course, but I had seen it once in a movie and had always wanted to try it myself. It was stupid as hell, but I was finally in that rare position where I could do as many stupid things as I ever wanted to. It was an amazing feeling, and I felt like a Roman tyrant with absolute power—power to blow up microwaves and hunt man-beasts, at least.

Soon the smell of rotten eggs filled the kitchen, and I walked back to the bar. I grabbed three jars of illegal moonshine that the late Ramses had hidden under the bar counter and poured them all on a disgusting, cotton-covered sofa that had been bolted to the wall next to the pool table, and I lit it on fire. The goddamn thing almost blew up when the match fell on it, and it was evident that it didn’t even need the moonshine. The putrid love seat was already soaked with thousands of spilled drinks and other sordid—and most likely flammable—body fluids.

I watched the sofa burn with satisfied eyes and cherished the fact that the toxic flame was taking with it a slice of human history that wasn’t worth repeating under any circumstances. There was something truly liberating about the purging fire, and I wanted to fix a godfather and enjoy the whole show, but the smoke was getting thicker, and it started to burn my eyes. I threw one more jar of white lightning on the flames and left Johnny D’s. It was the last time that anyone would step into that cursed bar where madness reigned and naive dreams were crushed like a fallen lollipop. That thought made me happy, but the real reward was the fact that the fire was going to make the gentleman criminals a little less gentlemanly.

After my final errand of the night was successfully completed, I started driving home with waves of gratification rocking my tired soul gently. Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”
was playing in my head like a miniature dive bar jukebox, and lassitude filled my eyelids with sandman’s lead. It was time to get some sleep and forget the horrors of the night.

As I passed my favorite Chicken in a Cannon, I heard a loud explosion in the distance and knew that Johnny D’s had served its last rattlesnake sausage.
Rest in peace, hellhole.
I regretted that I hadn’t taken the bratwursts from the refrigerator because they were innocent and didn’t deserve to be left to die in a filthy dive bar kitchen. My only hope was that I would one day encounter a mighty sausage like that again, even if that encounter would take place in eternity. At least the bratwursts had been cooked before they died.

I also thought about D’s regulars and wondered what they would do now that their favorite bar had burned down. The loyal customers had, after all, been waiting for the whole year for their special night and that rare opportunity to taste Ramses’s wonderful riot punch. Well, the good news was that the blighted city still had plenty of bars where the bloody and bruised were served; where ten crumpled dollars turned even the filthiest gutter pariah into a valuable customer for a couple of fleeting hours. It was also very likely that I had saved some lives—directly or indirectly—by burning down the goddamn snake pit, so it was all good.

When I got home, I checked the news and saw that the situation in Europe had gotten worse, much worse. Most of the governments had lost control of their citizens, and the continent was burning. People were rushing into airports and train stations, but all the flights and trains had been suspended because of the chaos. Ferries and boats were so full of panicking families that they capsized immediately after they left the dock, and all the highways were full of burning cars and trucks. There was no escape.

The outlook for the United States wasn’t much brighter, and the scariest predictions about the Atlantic hurricane had come true. One renowned expert said that the storm was going to become so colossal and powerful that there wasn’t even a number for it on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. The monster had formed faster and with more force than any hurricane in the history of mankind, and the whole scientific world was left slack-jawed. It was a nameless beast from hell, and it had spread out its deadly arms like Slender Man and sucked all the radioactive particles into its belly from the easterly winds blowing from dying Europe. The cruel slayer was now approaching the eastern United States like a devil’s freight train with a murderous focus on the most populated areas of the continent. The landfall was expected in three days, and people were told to go as far west as possible, as fast as possible, and by any means possible. It was estimated that anyone who got out of the kill zone quickly enough would have a decent shot at survival. The ones who stayed behind would get sick and eventually succumb to thyroid cancer and other horrible illnesses. That was pretty much guaranteed.

The magnitude and the incredible suddenness of the disaster shocked the whole world to its core, and it was simply incomprehensible to most people that nature’s unstoppable fury and man’s sad failures could collude in such a cataclysmic way. People seemed to be unwilling to accept that their lives would never be the same again, but they had no choice. The true Antichrist had descended from the heavens, and suicide was the only way to escape from reality.

One of the local news anchors tried to explain the effects of the nuclear storm on live TV the best she could, but the stylish woman started crying in the middle of her sentence, and she collapsed to the floor with a loud bang. The picture went dark, and I figured that it was a damn good indicator that you should get the fuck out of Dodge.

It was evident that total chaos was only hours away, and I decided to visit my favorite Chicken in a Cannon for one last time. I was completely drained from the day’s fun-filled activities, but there was no way in hell I was going to leave town without having one last Chicken Supreme. No way in hell.

I jumped into the Econoline with the sleepy Cheetah in my pocket and started driving to the restaurant that kept its welcoming doors open twenty-four hours a day. That was, however, under normal circumstances, and I was a little worried that the prospect of guaranteed nuclear poisoning had talked the manager into closing shop early and destroyed my dreams of eating my final Chicken Supreme. That was a truly disturbing feeling, and it scared me much more than the approaching storm.

I arrived at the restaurant’s parking lot with sweaty hands and an anxious mind, but to my great relief, the lights were on and the doors open. The regular staff was gone, though, and the franchise owner and his wife were the only ones working the shift. I figured that their employees had decided that serving a chicken sandwich to a hungry man wasn’t worth dying for—especially from radiation poisoning.

I glanced briefly at the menu and said a polite hi to the somber owner who was standing at the register with a yellow chicken hat loosely resting on his bushy hair. Then I ordered a Chicken Supreme and a large Dr. Pepper and said, “You know that there is a storm rising in the east, right?”

“Yes, sir. It’s going to be a big one,” he said with a thick Indian accent.

“Yeah, and it will bring more than just rain. You know that, too, right?”

“Yes, I know about the disaster in Germany, sir. I read the newspaper every day.”

“So, aren’t you going to leave?”

“Yes, we will be flying out tomorrow evening, maybe. We have relatives in San Jose. I would love to go right now, but I don’t want to leave my shop at the mercy of the looters. I have to cover the windows with plywood with my brothers before I go.”

“Do you think that there will be looting?” I said.

“What do you think, sir?”

“Yeah, I guess. Well, if you really feel like you need a brand-new TV in a nuclear hurricane, then it probably makes a lot of sense to run through a Walmart window and just grab one for free. You can enjoy your favorite show while your liver melts and your eyeballs explode.”

“Sir, people steal anything they can get their hands on,” the owner said calmly. “Even if the sky is falling. Especially, if the sky is falling.”